


devil may care enough

by sunshowerst



Series: danny and rusty, by everyone else on earth [1]
Category: Ocean's Eleven Trilogy (Movies)
Genre: Character Study, F/M, First Meetings, M/M, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-13
Updated: 2021-03-13
Packaged: 2021-03-20 16:27:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,609
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30007674
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunshowerst/pseuds/sunshowerst
Summary: Tess doesn't meet Rusty until Danny had already proposed to her, and even then she pays him no mind. Tess doesn't really meet Danny until Rusty calls one day to tell her, that her picture perfect husband's been arrested.
Relationships: Danny Ocean/Rusty Ryan, Danny Ocean/Tess Ocean, Tess Ocean & Rusty Ryan
Series: danny and rusty, by everyone else on earth [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2207406
Comments: 3
Kudos: 6





	devil may care enough

**Author's Note:**

  * For [cleardishwashers](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cleardishwashers/gifts).



> set before the first movie. i never wrote tess so i dont know how this one is

Daniel Ocean is the perfect man, is what Marcy told her after a month of hearing about him from Tess at every brunch and dinner they shared, a tradition kept from college days. 

_He isn't perfect,_ Tess would counter like the sensible one, _because he leaves his suit coat on the chair and it creases._ And Suzanne, the actual sensible one, would agree with the first part. And Tess would add, mock-serious, _he's perfect enough,_ dissolving the air above their table into just as airy laughter and fond eyerolls when her phone rings and it's Danny, asking when he should stop by to pick her up. 

It's always a luxurious place with Danny around, at first. But when they'd get together last minute and have no time for reservations, she'd sit in an Olive garden surrounded by people twice their age and lights that somehow always fell into her eyes under the wrong angle, he made it feel like a Michelin's top scorer. It was something about Danny that made the room feel different, arranged with care and with respect to him and nothing else. 

He wore Armani suits and fitted tshirts when they'd stay in, a watch that didn't scream about fortune but calmly stated it, like his voice was calm and creamy like the seats of his old-classic-but-classic and Tess was the only thing missing from his picture-perfect life that would've completed him. Made him perfect, without the enough. 

She was never one for theatre, an art curator because paint on canvas and it's placement were predictable, controllable, and the audience never was. She needed the fourth wall to hang more paintings on it, and the roles were never intriguing enough to draw her to the elective classes, even when she was young and everyone kept telling her she had the face for acting. 

But Danny looks at her like she'd look at Monet's water lilies, like he wishes there'd been more of canvas so more of them could fit on it. He looks at her like there'll never be a repeat of what she is then, every time, even in horrid lighting of a sticky tabled restaurant. 

She smiles, he grins back, and the stage is set, her role assigned. 

-

"You look lovely," Danny says, holding his hand out to help her descend the last few steps, and kisses her gently. 

Tess spends the twenty minute drive to the restaurant smiling, because he noticed she hated heels, and hated heels on steps even more, without her having to tell him. 

She'd told this to Marcy later, when they're smoking slims by her floor-to-ceiling window and sipping on the wine he'd brought her back from Avignon, and she'd said: "He's got to have a serial number on him somewhere. That man came out programmed from a factory." But her eyes were smiling and she was happy for Tess and kind of hating her for it, and Tess loved her enough not to blame her. 

That same thinly-veiled hate she'd spot in everyone around her, the more serious they'd gotten. In coworkers that rolled their eyes at her dreamy ones and ease in the sway of her walk. The barely-there signs of having it too good to be left alone, no one could help themselves to not fall under when Tess was already beautiful, and charming, and successful at the job she'd always wanted, and now in love with the class-and-style section of every male subscription magazine embodied in a beautiful, charming, and rich man who only had the eyes for her. Who loved her back, and charmed her mom and father into loving him, and fit their desired son-in-law slot like the designer gloves he'd bought for her mom at their first meeting and lunch. Who wasn't dull like everyone but Marcy and Suze was. Who _noticed._

She shrugged off the eyerolls and envious glares at her phone when it'd ring, at her back when she'd turn to walk away. Because Danny would joke that they were just looking out for her because he didn't deserve her, and she'd kiss that lie off of his lips and not taste the truth in it like she should have. 

-

When Danny proposed to her, in January, after driving her parents back to their house and driving the two of them to a penthouse with her own set of keys for it, and after they had sex on the bed ridden with white lilly petals, because of course he noticed that, too, she'd swear she'd been handpicked by God to live out heaven on Earth. 

"I love you, Tess," he whispers and kisses her hair, her shoulder, her mouth, voice like honey like his eyes were, in golden low candlelight, and she stops fearing the forever. 

-

It's a while - seven months of a while, six of which they'd lived together - before his noticing rubs off on her, and she starts picking up on... things, as well. 

Sometimes it's like he sees her differently. 

The first thing was when he orders food for the both of them after a week of being away over closing a sales deal, and it's not even her fifth choice, and she'd come to expect him to know and predict everything about her. 

So the waiter brings out a shrimp platter that could be a two days worth of meals and garlic bread that wasn't whole grain and salted butter she'd abstained from since she was twelve. 

And Danny grins at her a second too late when he realizes why she's looking at him questioningly, apology written all over his face. And then he says how he just wanted her to try out his diet, because they'd be living together and he'd want to know what of it she'd eat if he cooked it for her. 

And who would fault him after saying that? 

More often than that, were the silences that'd pass between them. 

When they watched movies together, and Danny insisted they watch the old ones - _the classics, you've got to get in on it_ \- he'd look to her when something of note happens and expect her to finish a sentence he never even started. His grin would falter, for a second, and look wooden for a second after, and then he'd explain the joke that doesn't end up making sense to her anyway. 

But she laughs to indulge him and he steals some of her popcorn, and looks like he walked right off of the screen in all the glitz and glory a beauty like his deserved to be given credit for. She forgets that one joke, because every next one leaves her struggling to compose herself without faking it. And for some strange reason and only for a second again, she feels happy to be included even though it's only her and Danny on _their_ sofa, in _their_ apartment. 

-

It's just like the suit coat, she assures herself when Danny comes home too late once every few weeks and looks through her for a while before he remembers she's there. 

He does that after long phone calls sometimes, ones that have him walk out to the balcony and his face looking pinched and stress-lined when he comes back inside. 

She asks him after one such call, if work was going well. And she swears she sees him startle slightly as if it's not her that he'd expected to be there, before walking over to cup her face and kiss her. 

He asks her how the planning's going instead of an answer, and _actually_ listens when she lists color shades of each bridesmaid's bouquet on purpose to test his limits, and as always falls in love anew when he says a few days later, that he made some calls and found a place to get jacarandas from fresh. 

-

She meets Rusty days before they agree on the date of their big day. 

Someone else waits for her in an unfamiliar car in front of the dress salon she frequented lately and at this point couldn't wait to stop having to come to.

She waves off her designer, Emille, and the haze of champagne escapes her with a breath of relief at the cold, sobering weather they barely got in May, and feels a yet unwarranted chill settle in her spine when the man pins her down with a stare from behind the wheel.

Her bags end up in the backseat and she ends up in the passenger one, silently wondering why Danny wouldn't make it in time to pick her up and why he didn't tell her the name of the man who would.

He starts the car when she shuts the door and suddenly her senses are overwhelmed in the unfamiliarity of his car, his heavy-handed application of cologne, the ridiculously offensive color combination of his suit that would've given Emille an ulcer and was in the process of giving her a headache until she looked away and remembered Danny sent him, and said in the text that he was a friend that would come pick her up, and she didn't get to meet any of his friends before, so might as well seize what she'd been inconvenienced into. 

"I'm Tess," she says, because this was before she knew better of keeping the upper hand to herself, and he smiles a cut across his face as if he heard her inner lament up until that point.

"I know who you are."

She's even more uncomfortable in the silence that ensues, even his car was soundless, effortlessly gliding through the usually sordid traffic like a knife through salted butter - she almost caves and asks his name, but remembers that he was the rude one and his voice was just this side of cold and Danny will tell her, if she asks him instead. If she even needs to remember him. 

He drops her off at Marcy's house, at her insistence, and carries her bags for her but doesn't bother opening the door when she pauses for a few seconds, expecting him to, like she was used to Danny doing it. 

Marcy blinks at whatever she saw on his face and closes her mouth a second too late, shooting a look and a half in Tess' direction when he steps inside to set the bags down.

"Can I get you anything?"

"Just water, please. Got a long drive ahead of me," he says and his tone is shades different to the one he directed at Tess in the car. In hindsight, she should've guessed some things, given how obvious the clues that were put in place for her were.

Tess, for her part, suppresses the need to look at him again and check if she'd dreamed him and his every man Joe approach to pattern combinations up. 

She instead walks up the stairs to shed her coat and ignores his eyes on her back and the telling, familiar, airy laugh her bridesmaid to be let out soon after, and selfishly hopes she'll never have to see him again.

-

And she doesn't. Not until the wedding.

-

"Tess. You've met Rusty."

His smile is warm like Danny's hand above her elbow is warm this time around, and she should've questioned it more, but it was her wedding and her husband turned heads wherever they stepped together in the hall he booked, ballroom sized with their music supplied by a world famous quartet. She didn't find it in herself to care for inconsistencies, and upper hands, and suits that were made with acid tripped snakeskins in mind.

After all, she was raised under a glass bell, every breath counted and nurtured and cherished. She'd never seen a threat before that did not collide with the glass before she could feel its teeth.

"A word, Danny?"

Danny leads her to the close family table and she listens with sufficient interest to a story from his college buddy with a strange, british sort of accent, about his first steps into the world of business with her husband. Danny, her husband. She'd never wear the shine off of saying it. 

The first chance she gets to turn around and look for him, clinging to his presence already, she does so less than subtly and doesn't see him anywhere. 

The dread in her spine is back but Marcy walks over looking like she'd been looking for her and Tess never did give herself enough credit for sensing it when she did, the lack of experience and depth perception in mind. 

-

"What kind of name is Rusty?"

Danny tenses beside her - just a moment, and at the time she thinks she understands why. He was handsome, now that she'd seen him act civilized, if Marcy was any sort of indicator to go by, and Tess had the eyes and academic knowledge of an art appraiser whether she wanted to use it or not. She was elated at the time, seeing Danny get jealous over her saying another man's name, even if she was naked in bed next to him. Even if that man was just some friend from work that Danny had drive her to her friend's house once.

At the time, she thought Danny to be that obvious, because that's the kind of man Danny played at being, around her.

"You should ask him that," he says lightly, and leans on his right arm to trail a kiss up her neck as his left hand glides like a trail of warm water down her stomach, smoother than the silk of her underwear when he pushes it down. 

She doesn't even remember who she was to ask what, after that.

-

They come down for breakfast, high on giddiness and the wait for the honeymoon they were to fly off to tomorrow. In Mali. For a week, just the two of them. When she woke up that morning with sunlight caught in the wedding band's myriad of diamonds and Danny's golden tanned arms around her as he slept, she'd decided the epilogue was the best part of any book she'd ever read. 

They walk up to the table Rusty was sitting at, spreading strawberry jam on a peach wedge with eerie grace Tess couldn't chalk up to anything at the time.

She sensed Danny tense again, and smiled to herself at what she saw as plain and simple possessiveness. As if anything about Danny was plain or simple. 

Rusty had bitemarks up to his jaw, like those Tess had on her upper back, and just as fresh as hers were. Danny forgets to pull the chair out for her then. 

"So, Marcy, huh?" Tess asks to break the tension after a long look the two men shared, and Rusty smiles at her genuinely for the first time since she met him.

"So you--" 

Rusty _laughs_ , and here she was convinced his face wasn't human enough to let it occur. 

"It's really not that--" 

"--funny? Well I--" 

"Of course you do."

She ends up stealing some of Danny's pancakes, and slicing a bagel in half to lather in cream cheese and cherry tomatoes. 

When she looks up, Rusty is staring at her husband with no trace of the amusement from minutes ago, looking like he'd never smiled in his life. She looks at Danny and briefly sees something she hadn't in all of nine months they lived together, but then he turns to her and smiles reassuringly, all Danny. 

"Not until you try."

Danny says it while looking at her and then he squeezes her hand, and this time around she senses that it'll be a while 'till Rusty's invited anywhere near them again.

The relief she felt at that thought struck her something familiar, some instinct she didn't pay much mind to.

-

-

She picks up the phone one night, when Danny was away on a business trip with his other college buddy turned investment partner. 

She hears a familiar voice and the dread comes back like a salve that served to hurt more, because it's been three years of bliss and she forgot that he existed.

"Danny's been arrested."

-

She looks at him across the table. 

He halts in his task of spreading butter on a slice of garlic bread and looks up at her as if he felt the weight of the gaze, and smiles like he'd been waiting on her to catch up since the day at the salon.

And she feels the gears in her head click into place, the moment she sees his eyes. Blue, unreal. Her chest freezes over. 

_("What are you looking at?" she asked him on their third day in Mali, pressing a kiss to his shoulder and giggling when he kissed her instead and made a face at the sand on her lips._

_"Just the water. 'S pretty."_

_Tess follows his line of sight to the ocean, and internally decides it is pretty, the bright blue, and somehow disconcerting._

_"Is this going to be yet another Ocean joke?" she finally asks, and the laugh it gets out of him melts the unease away.)_

"You're--"

Rusty smiles again. A _go on._ A _what can you possibly tell me that I haven't known since before you knew who I am._

She remembers the car ride, the line he gave her. A hint, the first thing he ever told her was just that. _I know who you are._ He didn't continue and say, _you don't know who I am though._

And now, three years later, her life was falling apart and uncaring for the effort and work she'd put into building up to this, all of it, and Rusty was uncaring and eating and being polite because it wasn't his life that's been upturned. 

"It was Danny's call. But I don't really care what you think of me."

"Why is that?"

"Seems regardless of it, things go down the way I expected them to."

He could've gloated, said it with malice, with faux pity like the fur of his hideous coat is faux.

But he says it like reading Wednesday's forecast off a teleprompter, like a fact that shouldn't matter much and is thereby overlooked.

It's funny at the end of the day, that that would be her excuse to herself. That she overlooked Rusty and his place in Danny's life, when he always wore the flashiest things screaming to be looked at.

Like poison dart frogs of the Amazon rainforest that inspired a painting she drilled for in one of her showings, he wore a warning and couldn't be held trial for other's tendency to ignore it.

She despised him and sat a meter across from him with a dull knife at her disposal, and he ate away at his double order of fish fillet all the same. Nonplussed, relaxed as her world burned, by miles every second she'd spent there that he'd been quiet for. 

"Despicable."

He raises an eyebrow, amused. She rolls her eyes and refrains from giving the small town bistro's people a show, even if they'd never see either of them again. 

-

Rusty pays with god knows who's money, and it makes her throat itch to think of that again. To think of her walls painted and her house furnished with unwilling crowdfunding. To think of thinking of having kids with Danny and-

"I'm helping run a hotel chain."

She blinks, and trusts her eyes not to burn anymore. 

"How nice for you."

"That's the card I used to pay this with."

Tess wonders if she'd always been that easy to read to him. She wonders if he'd have come over more often, been more concerned about her role if she hadn't been. If he was doing her this kindness for Danny's sakes, or cause he pitied her.

 _Heaven is a Place on Earth_ is blasting from the radio, and she never felt more ridiculous than in the passenger seat of her husband's criminal friend's car with a donner wrapper by her left foot, hearing that song and wondering what could've been of her, had she quit when she was ahead. When her father said, _he's a good man, but think it through._ When she said, _you're unreal,_ and Danny laughed before kissing her again.

She casts a glance his way and expects to get an answer to that as well. He smiles at the road, and it doesn't at all look like it came easy. Tess decides for a start that she's better off not knowing.

-

-

The last hour of their drive she concludes that Rusty never had to choose. 

She did, because she can't stand everything else, everyone waiting for the first public mess-up of their favorite conversational topic at brunch. Rusty, on the other hand, has no appearances to keep up, and according to Danny, no tight knit family or high strung burnt friends to prove wrong and give mercy to in winners visitations. He had it easier, keeping up with Danny. It was an unfair advantage from the get-go.

"The one you met when you drove me home," Tess says, under the assumption he'd forgotten Marcy's name since he never called her again. He nods in acknowledgment. "She met a guy that her mom said wasn't right for her. She never married after that."

"Being orphaned is a privilege," Rusty says cheerfully after a contemplative nod, and Tess realizes with redundant shame how ridiculous this divorce and the marriage that came before it was to try and justify.

Like setting up two art pieces together because they match in colors and no one in the mindless mass of visitors would get why it would be insane to have the Red Orchestra and any of Bacon's work next to each other. She should've never kept that logic confined to the art galleries.

"He picked you." She stares at him and knows why she wanted him to drive. It was a disbalance, she could watch for clues on his face. He couldn't look at hers. With no small amount of bitterness, Tess thinks he didn't really have to.

"I was on the other side of the country when he did it."

And that was unexpected. Because Rusty told her over the phone that they were thieves. Conmen. He said it like he uses _we_ more than any other pronoun when talking about the two of them. He could be lying to her now, that he wasn't involved. But then again, he wasn't arrested, and if Tess didn't believe Rusty, she did believe the justice system wouldn't have let him off scat free for a smile. 

Still, there were _things_. 

"You knew he was going to rob the museum?" 

Rusty rolls his eyes, as if to tell her that she'd been asking the wrong questions. She almost wants to remind him that she's not exactly a cop trained to interrogate thieves, but then again, this conversation was exactly that kind of one-sided.

"And I told him it was a bad idea. He didn't listen. I didn't come and help." She thinks she hears regret in that last sentence, but it doesn't mean anything to her, because she doesn't know why he is emphasizing it. 

"I'm picking them," she concludes instead, nodding to herself, and doesn't care for the sadness in her own voice. They - her parents, Marcy, Suzanne, and the chattering cloud of faceless people that came packaged with the dollhouse - were safe, familiar. Boring, yes, but safe. And Danny would be in prison for seven years, or less if he plays up what he played to her. Tess wouldn't put it past him, she thinks with a wistful smile, and that's reason enough. Excuse enough.

"You don't get to choose where what goes, like it's a gallery opening." When she turns to him, her eyebrows raised, he's looking at the road still. "Who are you showing it for?"

"And you're wearing all that for yourself?" she says with all the bite her bruised ego could handle delivering, and Rusty shrugs, dropping the philosophy lesson with a grin.

"So people dont take me as serious."

"Like I didn't?"

He steals a glance her way that all but says it, and has the decency to look as apologetic as one can while smiling.

_Look where that got you._

Tess steels herself, crumpling the divorce papers in her hand slightly when her fist clenches. 

She thinks about Marcy, and how she'd never given herself or anyone else a second chance. She thinks about Suzanne and her boring, safe husband. And their boring, safe lives that she tried to escape and ended up driven to a courthouse by a criminal to get a divorce from another criminal who decided, for three years at least, to play a man that a boring, safe woman wouldn't dare to miss out on. 

She loved him, still. The man that she'd met, it couldn't have all been fake. Just, distilled, so she can swallow it easier. And if he'd never gotten arrested, she wonders if she'd have ever found out - wonders if that's the way she should start thinking if she wants to get out of here sane. 

"Will you tell him about today?"

Rusty's quiet for a few moments, for show.

"No. This is all you and him. I told you, I didn't come to help him with it."

And she thinks she's starting to understand some of it. That in the upside down world she'd been thrust into with only a golden band around her finger, Rusty probably thought that was a kind-hearted gesture. Or a favor, or a principle thing. Maybe it was, and that's why he was repeating it so many times. She wasn't about to thank him for it. Because if he did help Danny, maybe she'd have still been convinced he was a stock broker native to New York.

"Okay."

"For what it's worth, I tried to make this marriage not happen. And when it did, I tried to make it work."

"Are you saying that any of this is _my_ fault?" 

He looks at her like he's not driving, and she wonders for the second time, if she'd been hallucinating him all along. He looks at her like he's tired of being here, because he wanted to avoid it but something she did - as clueless as she was, as all-knowing as he was - severely affected it.

"No. I'm saying that it wasn't all a lie. He does love you."

Something in the way he says it sounds, like her coworkers, like her best friends and her mother that one time. Like thinly veiled envy, but less of it, and he _was_ a conman. If Danny could fake being a regular person for four years, Rusty could fake being jealous of her to make her feel less pathetic. Somehow and for today, in a car with a master thief, she doesn't think she cares for the ego, more than she cares for the truth. 

"He didn't love me enough."

Rusty shrugs at that, and the grin is back in place. 

"He didn't give you the choice."

He doesn't say anything else for the rest of their ride back, and something about the honesty in his voice makes her think it wasn't her that he was talking about. And then he smiles at her when at a stoplight, like at breakfast the day after their wedding, and Tess is sure what she'd done was right from that alone. He wasn't doing this, any of it, for her.

Tess doesn't thank him when he pulls over by their apartment she would have to move out of. 

He nods as if she did, and drives off.

**Author's Note:**

> i feel like shed have a lot of inhibitions (read: normal friends.) i also feel like 'a word, danny?' is where they went off to have bestfriend sex but what do i know
> 
> as always, feedback appreciated! sneek this one i promised nearly a week ago but it took a while didnt it. hope its up to par regardless! 
> 
> and as always these days, thank you cleardishwashers.ao3.edu for my life


End file.
